The Lobster Kings (24 page)

“We’re vulnerable,” I said.

“They think we’re soft,” he said.

“A soft underbelly?”

I thought that would make him stop, and I said it to see if he’d get mad, but he just shrugged, which was not what I’d expected. “What happened with me and Al Burns happened a long time ago, Cordelia. You’ve got to learn to let things go.” We turned into our yard and Daddy opened the gate. “My guess? They think that if they push us hard enough, we’ll fold.”

“Will we?”

He grinned at me. “Well, tomorrow’s the first day of a new season. So we’re bound to find out, aren’t we?”

A
s soon as dawn broke, men were backing their trucks up to the wharf, unloading traps and stacking them on the ground, tying their boats to the dock and loading up gear. On the first day of a season, we all pitched in, nobody worrying so much about whose traps it was that you were hauling, just as long as we kept everything moving. We’d get a boat loaded up, the captain would motor off, and by the time four or five more boats were loaded and gone, that lobsterman would have returned to help. And it wasn’t just us lobstermen who were carrying traps and giving a hand. The start of the season was an event that lasted most of the day. Lobstermen and wives were the first ones down at the docks, and as the morning progressed there were usually a few tourists who decided to jump in. By noon, the teenagers had all been rousted from their beds and they formed lines to pass the traps down.

Each boat could take anywhere from fifty to one hundred traps, depending on its size, which meant that we all had to take at least two trips, and sometimes three, to get our limit of one hundred and fifty traps in the water. It was a riotous mess of yelling and cursing and laughing. The day was cloudless and sixty
degrees, perfect for working, but I couldn’t have cared less if it had been thirty-three and sleeting, because Kenny was back.

He was waiting for me in Daddy’s yard when I came out the porch door. Kenny was sitting on one of my traps and fiddling with his knife, snapping it open and then closed. He gave a smile when Trudy started yapping and slammed herself into him. She was so excited that I thought she’d wag herself over onto the ground. She let out these little moans that sounded like she was trying to sing.

“That’s my girl.” He scratched at Trudy’s chest. Then he looked up at me and said, “Ready to load her up?”

I sat down next to him, and with that he looked away from me. Whatever confidence he had in his voice disappeared as I stared at him. “Where the fuck have you been?” I couldn’t keep my voice from cracking.

He laughed, but he still didn’t look at me. “I guess we’re not just going to pretend nothing happened, yeah? I sort of like the idea of ignoring the obvious and just getting back to the way things were.” Trudy dug her face between his legs, and he worked his fingers behind one of her ears.

“You’ve been gone for months. You skipped out of here even before Sally.”

“I didn’t feel like being here to wave her off when she left. I figured I’d rather be the one to leave than the one to be left behind.”

“You didn’t say anything to me. You just disappeared.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I know I should have something more to say, but I don’t. I was a coward.”

“But you’re back,” I said. I took the knife out of his hand. It made a satisfying click when the blade locked open. “You knew about what was going on with her therapist? He had the balls to show up and help her move off the island.”

“I know about it,” he said. “Didn’t at the time, but yeah, she told me.”

We sat silently for what felt like a long time. He kept staring
at the ground, and all I could do was try to break the quiet. “Would it make you feel better if I told you that the boys have been calling her Sally the Whore, like it’s all one word? Like, Sallythewhore was a good teacher, but it’s nice to have Carly back on the island, or Sallythewhore was never cut out for the island, or Sallythewhore seems like the kind of gal who should be living in James Harbor.”

“Does that make me feel better? Honestly?” Kenny finally looked at me, a small smile creeping onto his lips. “Yeah, a little.”

He had his hands on his thighs, and I reached out and covered one of his with mine. “I’m sorry, Kenny. I’m really sorry.”

“Things had run their course. That happens with marriages sometimes.”

I gave a squeeze but left my hand where it was. “It doesn’t mean it’s easy, and even if you and Sally splitting is a good thing, I’m sorry. It was probably good for you to get off the island for a while and have some time away.”

“I should have called, I guess,” he said.

“You guess?” I shook my head and stood up from the lobster pot and then put my hand on his shoulder. “Yeah, a call would have been nice, Kenny. I know you had a lot to deal with, but I was thinking that I was going to be going out today without a sternman.”

He looked up at me with a smile and a bit of surprise. “You didn’t hire somebody else on? I mean, I was hoping, but I figured you would have.”

I pressed the catch on the back of the handle, folded the blade closed, and handed him the knife. “Nah. I limped along without you for the spring season. Everybody was afraid that Trudy would tear them up if they tried to replace you,” I said, which was funny because the most Trudy would ever tear up would be a pillow on the couch. There’d been no shortage of boys who were interested in being my sternman. I fished on shares, which meant that the more I caught, the more my sternman made, and everybody knew that the Kings fished like we owned the ocean.

“Will you have me back on?”

“Kenny,” I said, but then my voice faltered. I could feel a knot forming in my throat; I tried to speak again, but nothing came out. It didn’t matter, because Kenny was on his feet and he had his arms wrapped around me, hugging me.

W
e have two Brumfitt Kings paintings. They are the weird, almost magical paintings that are looked down upon by Brumfitt scholars and collectors, but they would still be worth a lot of money if Daddy got it in his head to sell them. He jokes that they are his retirement fund, though if he was interested in money he would have sold the journals, which would bring enough money to buy a couple of waterfront houses on the island. The two paintings are on semi-permanent loan to the Brumfitt Kings Museum in the village, which brings the grand total of Brumfitt paintings in the museum from zero to two, though it does have quite a few sketches and studies and other odds and ends that are purported to be from Brumfitt’s life. Daddy’s said a couple of times that he knows where to find an even bigger trove of paintings than the one C. C. Harel unearthed, that a selkie, a mythical creature that turns from a seal into a human on land, told him where, and he’d be happy to share if only somebody would bother to ask him, but that’s one of his full-of-shit stories and Rena, Carly, and I have mostly gotten into the habit of ignoring him—or, as he likes to call it, patronizing him—when he starts going off about the subject of Brumfitt’s other lost paintings.

I’d be a lot more interested if I could find what I like to think of as Brumfitt’s lost journals. We’ve got the full set if you go strictly by dates, but after the seventh journal, when Brumfitt describes how the ocean gave him his wife, the last five journals just become ledgers. He accounts for the tonnage of fish caught by the fleets that used the island, tracks his household finances, and writes down important dates, including the births—and in the case of his eldest son, the death—of his children. But none of those later journals have the visions and images that are rife in the first seven journals, the descriptions of Loosewood Island that have led some historians to claim that Brumfitt must have endured episodes of madness. And there is the paucity of them: seven journals filled in his first eight years on Loosewood Island, but only five more for the next fifty-three years? I hadn’t ever thought about it when I was young and I’d slip one of the early journals out from the glass-fronted bookcase and curl up under a lamp to read. I must have just assumed that there had been something that changed him with marriage. That shows you the lack of imagination that children can sometimes have: I was willing to believe that Brumfitt’s bride was borne to him across the surface of the ocean, that she materialized from the water with a dowry of bounty and doom, and yet I also believed that marriage would have transformed him into someone only interested in numbers.

Brumfitt wrote the date in the front of each journal, and occasionally dated pages or sketches within them, so that it was fairly easy to track his progress across the pages of the journals, but there was a gap between the seventh and the eighth journals. The gap is only six months, but there is no gap in dates between the early journals that lasts more than a few days. I can’t help but wonder if there is another whole set of journals that keeps going, that describes what happened
after
his wife stepped from the ocean, that continues to detail the odd miracles and monstrosities that he encountered on Loosewood Island.

K
enny held me for a few seconds, and then when we heard the sound of the screen door slamming shut, he gave me a squeeze and stepped away. Daddy sauntered down the steps, a steaming cup of coffee in his hands.

“Kenny,” Daddy said.

“Woody. How you been feeling?”

Daddy rolled his eyes and leaned against the wall. “I get enough of that from my daughters. Jesus. They find you passed out in the kitchen
one
time, and suddenly they act all concerned.”

Kenny laughed. “Just don’t go dying on us.”

“I’m not planning on it. So how about you two start working?”

“Hey, Daddy?”

“I know, I know,” he said. “You’re going to tell me to fuck off.”

I grinned. “I was going to tell you that I love you.”

“Ah, save it for Kenny,” he said. If I’d had any coffee of my own, I would have choked on it, but neither he nor Kenny noticed; they were already working on loading the pickup.

Daddy’s pickup, which meant that his traps went on first, and then after he’d finished dropping all of his at the docks it would be my turn. I suppose I could have bought my own truck, but I
never saw the point. There just weren’t that many roads to speak of on Loosewood Island. Probably a third of the islanders didn’t even own trucks or cars—or if they did, they kept them with relatives on the mainland—and the roads we did have were circuitous and winding. To get from one place to another, it was quicker to walk down the beaten paths of dirt and rock, or maintained paths of gravel or crushed shells, than to actually take the serpentine roads. When I needed a truck on the island, mostly just to haul my traps up from the dock when they weren’t in the water, I borrowed Daddy’s. He kept a second truck on the mainland, parked at a buddy’s workshop near the docks in James Harbor, and the few times that wasn’t available, I rented a car.

We weren’t moving that quickly, and we only had a few traps on the truck when Stephanie came into the yard. She was yawning. Trudy bounced over and pushed her head into Stephanie’s stomach.

“You guys sure get yourselves going early,” she said. She scratched Trudy behind the ears and then rubbed at her eyes. She had an elastic around her wrist, and she slipped it off and then pulled her hair back into a ponytail. “There,” she said, “my hair’s done.” She looked at me and then shook her head. “You know,” she said, “you look put together for five-something in the darn morning. They should have a picture of you on the recruiting posters.” She banged Kenny on the shoulder. “Kenny, I presume? You’ve got the best-looking captain on the island.” I could feel myself burn hot, because of course I thought about how I looked out on the water with Kenny. Even though I had only been hoping that Kenny was going to come back, hope is a powerful thing.